Sensory Echoes

Some days, memory returns like dripping faucets,
each drop a tiny percussion
striking the enamel of time.
The furnace hums,
that old, muffled rush of heat
moving through winter rooms,
and I’m pulled backward,
as if warmth itself were a hand
closing around my shoulder.

I see again the torn and sun‑bleached posters
layered on a construction fence, in LA

a collage of half-forgotten faces and peeling colors,
a place where the city and it’s make-believe
seemed to shed its skin in strips.

My palm remembers the smooth worry stone,
how it settled in my pocket
like a secret I never confessed.

Taste recalls my Hong Kong moment

when the century egg,
I was dared, a joke, a shock of earth and alkali,
a foreign yet strangely grounding piece of history,
as though the centuries themselves
had dissolved on my tongue.

And then the odor of death,
not metaphor, not softened by language,
but the unmistakable gravity
that filled the room as my father slipped
into whatever comes next.
I wrote a eulogy meant for quiet air,
meant for him, meant for a stillness
that never arrived as I imagined.

But the roses.
their fragrance drifted up like a sudden doorway
into another realm,
lifting me beyond the antiseptic dark
into something almost holy.
No bouquet has ever touched
that place again.

Unexpectantly…

On various nights,
in the drifting hush before waking,
I relive my sensory echoes;

Dripping faucet,
warm air,

torn posters,

cold stone,

impossible egg,
death’s heavy breath,

roses bright as sunrise,
a quiet ethereal constellation of moments
I carry always,
glowing faintly in the dark landscape of my dreams.